Reactionary Running Mates
Susan Faludi sounds like Pat Buchanan
By Virginia Postrel
If Pat Buchanan is going to run for president, he’ll need a running mate. And with the
Reform Party a shambles, he needs to get creative, to find someone who can attract
positive attention and reach out to a different base.
I suggest feminist-of-the-moment Susan Faludi, star of Newsweek covers and myriad
newspaper puff pieces. She’s tiny and soft-spoken, an unlikely combination for a
political crusader. But like Buchanan, she uses an unthreatening manner to deliver a
radical message. Faludi and Buchanan are perfect for each other.
Both are clever wordsmiths, able to combine anecdotes and abstractions in a
compelling form. Both are adept at manipulating their media images, putting the
publicity-maximizing spin on their ideas, and turning up on the covers of news
magazines. Both are well-connected insiders who adeptly portray themselves as
populists. Both decline to let statistical truth get in the way of a good story. Both have
emotional styles that stress empathy for the common man. And both share a general
worldview.
It sounds absurd, of course. Buchanan is a man of the hard right, Faludi a woman of
the hard left. His 1940s hero is Charles Lindbergh; hers is Henry Wallace. They travel
in different circles, and they obviously disagree about abortion. In her latest book,
Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, Faludi even zings Buchanan for
abandoning his followers at the 1996 Republican convention.
But political tickets don’t depend on complete agreement or personal harmony. They
are alliances created to advance a common cause. And while Buchanan and Faludi
have many differences, they are both prominent advocates of a particular
understanding of what’s wrong with contemporary American life.
Both Buchanan and Faludi believe that Americans in general, and American men in
particular, have been betrayed?that the institutions, habits, and attitudes of our time
represent broken promises. They both look back on a better day, during and after
World War II, when American men could find meaning in job stability and collective
endeavors. Current social and economic arrangements, they suggest, have been
foisted on the good people of America by a cold system that cares nothing for their
needs or aspirations.
After World War II, writes Faludi in the highly touted Stiffed, "The promise was that
wartime masculinity, with its common mission, common enemy, and clear frontier,
would continue in peacetime.
Like GI Joe, [each American man] would be judged
not on his personal dominance but on his sense of duty, his voluntary service to an
organization made up of equally anonymous men. The dog soldier would continue to
have his day."
But, she says, that didn’t happen: "Where we once lived in a society in which men in
particular participated by being useful in public life, we now are surrounded by a
culture that encourages people to play almost no functional public roles, only
decorative or consumer ones."
Buchanan, in last year’s The Great Betrayal, anticipates the same theme of wistful
anger: "We are losing the country we grew up in. The times when we all sacrificed
together, as in World War II, and when we all prospered together, as in the 1950s, are
gone. America is no longer one nation indivisible."
Like Faludi, Buchanan is filled with nostalgia for the world of anonymous industrial
labor and stable social roles. "People know in their hearts that America will never
again be the country they grew up in," he writes. "The years slide by, family incomes
stagnate, wives go to work to make sure their children have the same things as other
kids at the public school do. For Middle America, something went wrong. They played
by the rules, but the promise was unfulfilled."
America has undoubtedly changed significantly over the past 50 years. But Faludi and
Buchanan never honestly examine the sources of the changes that so disturb them. For
his part, Buchanan tries to blame everything on international trade, as though there
were no other forces in American economic or social life. (For a more thorough
consideration of the trade argument, see Brink Lindsey’s review, "The Great
Contradiction," July 1998.)
The great thing about the trade story is that it offers a simple solution?high taxes on
imported goods?and easy-to-understand villains: foreigners and "Third Wave
America?the bankers, lawyers, diplomats, investors, lobbyists, academics, journalists,
executives, professionals, high-tech entrepreneurs?prospering beyond their dreams."
Buchanan plays to his imagined audience’s paranoia and envy. A presidential run will
test the appeal of that message and, if historical patterns continue, will find it lacking.
Faludi, on the other hand, attacks impersonal historical forces, not evil elites. The baby
boomers’ World War II—generation fathers, the Great Betrayers of her book, are
themselves declared victims of "consumerism," the "celebrity culture," and the
"ornamental culture." They couldn’t help letting down their sons?the market and the
media made them do it. Unable to blame someone in particular, she winds up saying
things like, "The betrayer has no face."
In her book and in interviews to promote it, Faludi stresses the crying need for
"control," even telling one feature writer that she takes notes on her book tour to
maintain her own sense of control. She doesn’t approve of the definition of
masculinity that depends on control, but neither can she accept a society where things
change without someone in charge. "These days," she complains in an interview with
Mother Jones, "everything changes overnight. Nobody knows who is in charge. No
one knows who to appeal to." The political action that could end men’s betrayal is
without a leverage point.
To both Buchanan and Faludi, the changes in American life over the past 50 years have
nothing to do with the desires or dissatisfactions of real, sympathetic Americans.
Those changes were either created by the privileged classes, disloyal to their nation
and contemptuous of its people, or by a de facto conspiracy between the media and
the "marketplace," neither of which has anything to do with real life. In either case, the
answer lies in "rebellion" through political activism.
These ideas make for impassioned prose, but they’re lame as historical analysis. The
very reason that cultural, economic, and social changes are so hard to control in a free
society is that they emerge through the uncoordinated choices of millions of people.
The world we live in is the product not of elite conspiracies but of dispersed, often
highly personal, decisions.
The fatal flaw in the Faludi-Buchanan message becomes apparent when you consider
the issue on which the two writers would seem most to disagree: the role of women in
American life, and most particularly in the economy. Buchanan attributes the rise of
working women to?what else??lower tariffs. Once John Kennedy started reducing
trade barriers, the ’50s family was doomed.
"The social costs?" writes Buchanan, "As workers’ wages stagnated and fell, wives and
mothers entered the job market in record numbers to maintain the family standard of
living. In 1960 fewer than one-fifth of women with children under the age of
six were in the labor force; today almost two-thirds are. The price is paid in
falling birthrates and rising delinquency, in teenage drug abuse, alcohol abuse,
promiscuity, illegitimacy, and abortions?and in the high divorce rate among working
parents. The American family is paying a hellish price for the good things down at the
mall." (Emphasis in the original.)
For Faludi, meanwhile, feminism has nothing to do with work. It is a form of rebellion
against consumer culture. Feminists threw out their Clairol and ignored the siren’s
song of snazzy appliances. Stiffed barely mentions women in the workplace, except to
pooh-pooh the concerns of men in traditionally masculine occupations.
This emphasis is just plain weird?but telling. The feminism that most American
women, and most American men, have embraced over the past three decades is the
feminism that says women can and should fully participate in economic, social,
cultural, and political life. It is not an ideal that rejects participation in the marketplace,
either as consumers or as producers, but rather one that gives women an equal shot. It
doesn’t declare women victims of their hair coloring. It simply encourages them to
find the identity, hair and all, that suits them.
The feminism that most Americans embrace (while often rejecting that label) is life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for women as well as men. Women went into the
workforce in part to make money for their families, particularly in the
inflation-ravaged 1970s, but also to address their own desires for stimulation,
independence, dignity, and, yes, personal consumption.
The social and economic changes that followed were a product of those myriad,
dispersed, undirected personal choices. "Nobody knows who is in charge" because no
one is, in fact, in charge. The dynamism that Faludi and Buchanan oppose comes from
the unplanned pursuit of happiness?the personal search, by trial and error, for better
ways of living.
If everything was wonderful in the good old days, the feminist story makes no sense.
Women should have been happy with the world as it was. They might have rebelled
against advertising, Faludi-style, simply by buying less stuff. They didn’t have to go to
work and buy even more.
Similarly, if everything was wonderful in the good old days of anonymous corporate
cogs, nobody would have bought The Organization Man, let alone In Search of
Excellence. There would have been no late-’70s enthusiasm for "entrepreneurship,"
extending to the present day. There would have been no stories about the rage of the
depersonalized, alienated factory worker, the bored and angry man on the assembly
line. Faludi and Buchanan are both old enough to remember a time when factory
work was portrayed as hellish subjugation or mind-numbing routine, not the stuff of
nostalgia.
The static world of postwar ideals changed partly because of "outside" pressures?from
foreign competition, from upstart companies, from social critics who hit a nerve?and
partly because it was in many ways to many people unsatisfactory. Today, Buchanan
acts as though only grueling physical labor, preferably in a noisy factory, is valuable
and real. Anything else?selling photocopiers, managing health insurance claims,
delivering packages, answering phone banks, providing emergency medicine,
remodeling houses, repairing computers?anything with a modicum of independence,
a clean office environment, ongoing public contact, or technical requirements is no
damned good. The Middle Americans who hold those jobs are not his people.
Buchanan’s anti-elitism excludes most Americans. So does Faludi’s. She tries to justify
her focus on the dysfunctional fringe of American life by declaring these outliers
indicative of the future mainstream. "Every human being who has lived a life has
something important to say," she told the Chicago Sun-Times. Every human being,
that is, who fits the story Susan Faludi wants to tell.
In an interview with The Gazette in Montreal, she encountered the inevitable
question about why Silicon Valley has no place in her book. Isn’t it full of men? "I
suppose I could have done a chapter on the perils of basing manhood on being an
Internet whiz kid," she said. "It’s hardly the same experience as learning something
that’s been handed down, a feeling that you’re contributing to a purpose."
So much for every human being having a valuable story. In fact, Faludi avoids
testosterone-drenched Silicon Valley, a place of great purpose and little "ornament,"
for the same reason Buchanan never mentions steel minimills. Their vision of the good
life as static and shaped by collective, political decisions depends on excluding any hint
that there might be winners in a world that has changed, that those winners might be
sympathetic, or that those changes might have come simply from people trying to do
things better.
The "elite" Buchanan hates so much is not primarily a privileged hereditary class but
rather Middle Americans, male and female, who want the freedom to be themselves
and the opportunity to find a better life. The good old days were bad for many people:
for free spirits who didn’t want to live through "service to an organization made up of
equally anonymous men"; for people who valued creativity over playing by the rules;
for people of the wrong background, color, or region; for people who wanted not "the
world we grew up in" but a better world. The Buchanan-Faludi ticket is a ticket not to a
happier, or even safer, future, but only to a future where somebody else is in control.
Virginia Postrel is editor of Reason magazine